Salt Lake City 1893

May 1, 2020

Painted in 2019

“This painting started out as a commission piece and all my client asked me to do was a historical piece of early Salt Lake City and for it to be somewhere from the North East side with a view of the Salt Lake Temple. As we got further along into the painting discussion he also asked if there could be some, what he said, “Tall, skinny trees,” that they used to have. Those trees were lombardy poplars, which I absolutely love and was excited about that. He also asked if I could do it in the fall. Everything else came after that.”

“What I normally do when I very first start a painting for a client is do a couple of sketches as I’m gathering my ideas. I do a really rough one on my idea and then a more tightened up sketch for my client to look at that will look pretty close to what the painting will end up being. As I started doing this I started doing historical research by going through historical books and photographs trying to find some ideas. Ron Fox helped me with some early photographs of Salt Lake City, which had these types of lombardy poplar trees in it.”

“As I got progressing in the painting I got this idea of seeing a house up on the hill with an irrigation ditch coming, so I sketched that into my drawing. I decided to do it from the North East side, so you can see Main Street and the East side of Salt Lake Temple. The towers are taller on the East side than the other side. Every time I do a painting of the Salt Lake Temple it’s like starting over because it is a very difficult building to draw and paint.”

“I went up on the hill where Heber C. Kimball had his compound. One of Heber C. Kimball’s home can be seen in the bottom left part of the painting, the brown building. I went up on the hill where the Kimball Apartments are and got all of my perspectives from that area. I ended up doing it in the fall with the lombardy poplars and all the stone walls that they had. The stone walls show how great the soil was. They were always picking the rocks out of the soil and built the fences with those rocks. That kept the animals in and kept other people’s animals out. It also helped keep the dust out of their compound in the summertime.”